Finishing the Professional Project May 3, 2011
We have now finished our Professional Project and are awaiting feedback from our client on everything that we have done. I spoke to him briefly this morning and he said he is excited to see what we have done, he has mentioned that he has now spoken to Bournemouth Council about the project too and they are also interested to see what we have produced for the project.
If we had more time then I would have liked to get more videos made; the animations for Salad and Clockworx (that were not able to be made due to unfortunately not being sent any work), and get in touch with the five newer clients that we were presented with last fortnight. It would be nice to continue the contact that we have with these companies and work with them in the future should we get the opportunity.
Just Over 2 Weeks Left April 16, 2011
It’s time to stop thinking of the deadline as three weeks away and remember that it is now just over two weeks away so it’s time to be firing from all cylinders. As far as progress from last week, the video for Redweb is now finished, we’ve begun editing our footage for Bright Blue Day but still have a few more scenes to shoot, almost everything is prepared ready for our Thinking Juice shoot, the two main jobs that are left are the biggest ones; our animations for Salad and Clockworx. I am confident with the idea for Salad but am not entirely sure on what we are doing for Clockworx as we have not yet been sent any client work from them that we can show. While this is the same situation for Salad, I can still begin the animation for now and put the work in later.
We are now also focusing a little more on the soundtracks for each of our videos as sound is typically something that you do not notice when it’s good but it stands out when it’s bad. For our Redweb video Mark has managed to contact an artist and we have got permission to use their song, and now we are focusing on contacting people we know and finding small, local artists to provide the music so that we do not have to worry about licensing issues or anything along those lines.
Fools Gold “Surprise Hotel” (to be used in our Redweb video)
Professional Project Update April 9, 2011
We have been working hard over the last few weeks making sure everything is coming together nicely. We have got all of our Redweb footage filmed, we went back for reshoots yesterday for our interviews to sort the sound and it’s all ready to be edited. We have filmed some footage down at the beach that we can use for our ideas for Bright Blue Day (hopefully we might be able to see them briefly next week) and are very happy with what we have filmed so if we do get the opportunity to meet them we can show it to David Ford and get his feedback on it as well.
We are meeting with Salad again on Monday to present Bella with a visual treatment of the sort of thing that we are looking to make for them. Between us we have had a number of similar ideas so we are making our own treatments this weekend then will make a collaborative one before we go to the meeting on Monday and present said ideas.
The website is coming along nicely and I have learnt a lot about Javascript and how the Google API works. Next on the list is to get my head around the Twitter API.
Progression in Professional Project March 22, 2011
We have now met with two of our clients so we can start making progress on their own particular videos. We have arranged filming dates with Redweb, we are going to attend one of their hack days to see them ‘at their most innovative’ as it were, as we came to the conclusion that we should focus on their innovation.
Our other meeting, with Clockworx, also went well, we are now waiting to be sent a series of files from their design department so that we can use the elements of their new website design in an animation.
In this time we have also arranged a meeting with Salad for next week so we will be able to go along and discuss ideas with them. We have decided to make the 8th of April our deadline for meetings, if we have not heard back from the companies that we have so far by then, then we will progress with the ideas that we have sent them in their treatments.
Preparing for Meetings March 9, 2011
Over the past two weeks we have been preparing for meetings that we have been arranging with our clients. So far we have only heard back from two; Redweb and Clockworx so we have made those our priorities for now. However if we have not heard back from the others by the end of the week then we plan on sending around another email to each of the companies to remind them that we want to have a little feedback from them on our ideas before we get working on what we have planned.
During these two weeks we have been thinking more about our ideas for each of the videos, finding more inspiration and looking at designs of maps and websites to get an idea of how we want ours to look. We have also begun thinking of a name for the project.
Professional Project Coming Together March 3, 2011
We have now heard back from all of our clients through Matt Desmier, we sent copies of our treatments to him to send on to the clients. From this point we can now start working on our ideas to improve them and make mood board to show our clients when we are able to meet with them.
Our next few steps involve making the mood boards to take along to meetings, and where possible, making small mock ups of our ideas to play to the clients so they can get a clearer picture of what it is that we want to produce for them. After spending the past two weeks waiting for responses for Matt, let alone the clients, hopefully we can get a quick response from the clients to get working quickly on the videos. However, if this is not possible, we should be able to use this time effectively to produce the design and initial prototype of our map.
Developments in Professional Project February 17, 2011
I feel that our Professional Project is coming along reasonably well. It is quite odd to feel this confident about it as we have not begun producing physical content yet but it is a project that I feel happy with that we can achieve a good quality amount of work within the time frame. We met with Matt Desmier again today to discuss the ideas that we have had so far to get his feedback and verify the companies that we will be working with as we were not 100% sure up until now.
Despite the small feeling that we had not progressed much straight after the meeting, after we reflected on it together (George, Mark and myself) we realised that we had made some progress, it was good to get the green light on our ideas, we got a good amount of feedback on said ideas. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have sorted out some prep for our meetings and have them all ready for next week.
As we have around 11 weeks left for this project it means that (if we are mainly doing the four companies) we have just under three weeks to complete each video and work on the web and interactive side throughout this time to continue tweaking it and adding to it. Hopefully once we have spoken to the companies properly then we will be able to make a more thorough time plan so that we can make sure we are keeping to our time frame properly and producing a good amount of work. Three weeks per video is going to be a vague guideline for now as some aspects will take less time than others, for example if we do make our stop motion for Thinking Juice then this could only really take us a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks, allowing us to then spend more time on other videos and aspects of he project. While we will make a time plan for the project I think that it is something that we will constantly be amending accordingly.
Tutorial with Bob Cotton January 27, 2011
Today we all had tutorials with Bob about our Professional Projects, the aim of the tutorials was to get us to identify what we our good and when it comes to selling ourselves to our clients. The main thing that I took from my tutorial is that I’m a pretty good all-rounder when it comes to skills, I just need to figure out what I want to specialise in. When I started talking to him about what I could do as I thought back I realised that I can do more things than I thought I could. I guess this is the main advantage of getting distracted easily, I learn a small bit about one thing, then move on to learning something else about another thing. Originally I considered this my downfall, I know how to do a multitude of things but I would not really say I was an expert on anything, however Bob put this into a different perspective for me and suggested that I may be good as a Project Manager when it comes to jobs in the media industry. I have the ability to help out many different areas of a production team without being dedicated to only one job. I don’t think I could only focus on one area in a job because I always feel the need to be doing more than one thing at once.
After going through my ‘list of skills’ with Bob we then talked about ways that I could present them in a portfolio as I acknowledged that in my work so far I really have not shown my skills to the best of my ability. I have been thinking about the briefs far too literally and trying too hard to make them fit in instead of exploring what I want to do, my main goal alongside the Professional Project would be to make myself a short video to act as a portfolio, and to redesign this blog; make it a little neater, put up my portfolio as the first thing you see, and use this as a time to improve on the skills that I have already gained on this course thus far.
I am also going to take this inspiration as an opportunity to get myself a little experience over the summer working for various companies and dabbling in more areas than I have before, mostly in order to get a better idea of what it is that I would like to do after the course but also to,again, improve on the skills that I have developed. I have already thought up a few projects and hopefully I will be able to get the ball rolling as soon as possible and achieve as much as I can over the Summer, while still keeping a good balance between work life and personal life. My plan is to get on with this as soon as possible while the motivation is still fresh on my mind and the creative juices are flowing.
PPRD 2: Reviewing the Professional Project January 27, 2011
For my Professional Project I will be working with South West screen to produce a showreel of some companies local to Bournemouth. As it has been a while since I have worked with video I am looking forward to revisiting it, looking at how much I can remember from previous experiences and tweaking my skills to learn more and improve my ability. I am also looking forward to working with my group, I will be with Mark Evenden and George Darrell, I get along quite well with the both of them so I think that we will gel as a group to produce something that encompasses the best of our abilities. I know Mark and George both have a lot of experience with video and I really enjoy looking at George’s photography, I think together we can produce something that shows the companies in the best light possible.
I think that within this project we will all be able to dabble in all of the different areas but I think that in particular I would like to look at the interactive side as this is possibility that I have thought of for a future career. I want to help out with the video aspects and I think between us we can assign jobs according to what we are best at to get the most out of this project. I am interested to know what it is that they companies are looking for on the interactive side as all that has been mentioned so far is using Google Maps, so I think that before we meet with them on Monday I will have a look at examples of the sort of thing that they may be looking for (the only thing that springs to mind at the moment is the Arcade Fire video, ‘The Wilderness Downtown‘).
